American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power (22 page)

That same day Hillary, who had alienated many in New York’s large Jewish community by calling for an independent Palestinian state, wrote a letter to Orthodox Jewish leader Mandell Ganchow declaring her belief that Jerusalem was “the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel.” She also stated her support for relocating the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to the Holy City.

Scarcely a week after announcing her candidacy, Hillary was with Bill at Camp David when aides informed them that Hillary’s only potential rival for the Senate nomination had vanished over the Atlantic. Days later, John Kennedy’s Piper Saratoga was lifted from the bottom of the sea, along with his body and those of his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and Bessette’s sister Lauren. Hillary, who had been among the mourners at Jacqueline Onassis’s funeral, now attended the memorial service for Jackie’s only son at New York’s St. Thomas More Church—accompanied this time by the President and Chelsea.

Now the Democrats’ only viable candidate for Moynihan’s Senate seat, Hillary was soon off on another of her “listening tours” to drum up support. Before embarking, the First Lady was spotted ducking into the Park Avenue offices of celebrity plastic surgeon Cap Lesesne, sparking rumors that she was nipped and tucked in preparation for her Senate run. Lesesne would neither confirm nor deny the reports, saying only that he counted a number of noted political figures among his patients.

Hillary, whose office denied the plastic surgery rumors, crisscrossed the state in a Ford conversion van promptly dubbed the “HRC Speedwagon.” She was photographed chugalugging coffee with the morning regulars at diners from Niagara Falls to the Finger Lakes, marching down Fifth Avenue in the Puerto Rican Day Parade, visiting a pediatric ward in Rochester, and wolfing down kielbasa at a deli on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

“I knew Hillary would do well on the campaign trail,” state Democratic Party chief Judith Hope later said. “But I was really kind of taken aback by just how good she was.”

Hillary’s approach to connecting with voters was, like everything else she did, methodical. Before meeting a group of contributors, she would ask for thumbnail sketches of each person she was going to be introduced to—including names of family members, where their children were going to school, vocations, interests, and accomplishments. Recalling a get-together of twenty-five contributors who gave a total of $100,000 to Hillary’s campaign, Long Island fund-raiser Marsha Laufer said that, having committed her thumbnail sketches to memory, Hillary “put everyone at ease immediately. With each person, she’d break the ice by asking a question about the college their child was going to, or where they’d just been on vacation.” Walking up to one guest who happened to be a theoretical physicist, Hillary broke the ice by asking about a recent breakthrough in his field. “As you can imagine,” Laufer said, “he was just over the moon.”

Yet Hillary was shrewd enough to realize that fund-raising dinners and photo ops were not enough. In closed-door meetings at the White House, she and her advisers brainstormed about ways to harness the power of the presidency to win over New York’s all-important racial and ethnic voting blocs. Any actions on Hillary’s behalf would have the added benefit of aiding Vice President Al Gore in his run for the White House.

Bill was eager to do whatever he could to help. “Our entire lives, she has always been there for me,” he said. “I owe everything to her.” Now, added one FOB, “it was payback time.”

At Hillary’s urging, the President stunned Justice Department officials by granting clemency to sixteen Puerto Rican terrorists who had been sentenced to prison following a wave of bombings from 1974 to 1983 that took the lives of six Americans and wounded scores of others. Incredibly, the terrorists had not even asked for clemency.

The bloodiest of these attacks took place at Manhattan’s historic Fraunces Tavern, where in 1783 George Washington bid an emotional farewell to his officers. On January 24, 1975, a bomb planted by the militant Puerto Rican nationalist Group FALN, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (Armed Forces of National Liberation), exploded at the height of lunch hour, hurling body parts into the street and killing four people.

When her husband handed out pardons to the FALN leaders, Hillary kept a low profile, careful not to appear as if she had been involved in the process. But neither she nor Bill had anticipated that the terrorists, unwilling to apologize or express any remorse for what they had done, would initially balk at accepting the clemency offer. They feared that, by accepting a presidential pardon, they would be giving up their cherished status as martyrs to the cause.

Over the next three weeks, Hillary pressed her husband to find some way to convince the terrorists to change their minds. The delay, she complained to a longtime Arkansas confidante, “really looks bad.” Once satisfied that they had made their point, the FALN leaders accepted the President’s offer and walked out of prison to the cheers of their supporters—all the while insisting that they had no regrets for what they had done.

Former U.S. Attorney Joseph DiGenova was among those who branded the FALN pardons as “despicable…. Let me say categorically,
the Puerto Rican terrorists were pardoned because they were a political benefit to the president’s wife. Make no mistake about it.”

No one was more outraged than Joe Connor, whose father was killed in the Fraunces Tavern bombing. “My dad…didn’t have any qualms with the Puerto Rican people. He was just a working guy. He was eating lunch with friends and his life was valued less than that of the president’s wife and Al Gore. It’s disgusting…They believed that by giving clemency this would rally the Puerto Rican vote for Hillary in New York.”

Connor, who along with other victims’ relatives was not informed of the terrorists’ impending release, also made a chillingly prophetic remark at the time—nearly two years before September 11. “The world is a much less safe place,” he said, “and this country is a much less safe place, as a result of letting these people out. Certainly, other terrorists might be thinking about attacking us. It will send the wrong message to people who may be planning something.”

FBI Director Louis Freeh opposed the pardons, as did the Justice Department, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and even New York’s other Democratic senator, Charles Schumer. So did Puerto Rico’s popular former governor, Carlos Romero-Barcelo, who pleaded with the President not to release the bombers. “How can we responsibly set them free?” he asked. “What if they kill somebody else? What do we say, ‘Too bad’?”

Initially, Hillary claimed she had not been involved in the President’s decision and was not familiar enough with the case to comment on it. However, she did express support for her husband’s actions. Hillary had understood that the late John Cardinal O’Connor had supported clemency for the Puerto Rican terrorists, and she told her husband’s advisers to use that information to defend the pardons. No sooner did the White House float that idea than it was shot down by the Archdiocese of New York, which
claimed the cardinal had never supported clemency. In the end, the Senate would vote 95–2 to condemn the FALN pardons.

As public outrage grew, Hillary did an abrupt about-face, claiming that she now opposed the pardons. By having it both ways, Hillary momentarily silenced her critics while at the same time leaving no doubt in the minds of New York’s Puerto Rican community that Hillary had done something for them.

Until now, the Clintons had made little use of the President’s clemency powers. Over the first six years of their administration, Bill had granted precisely the same number of pardons—74—doled out by his immediate predecessor in a single term. The FALN pardons, however, opened the Clintons’ eyes to the ways in which this particular constitutional power could be used to achieve a political—and in Hillary’s case, personal—advantage. This President, unlike all who had gone before him, was willing to ignore the Justice Department altogether in the granting of pardons. To the Clintons’ unalloyed delight, they could empty the jail cells of their choice and, by merely claiming that it served the interest of justice, suffer no lasting consequences.

In another blatant ploy to curry favor with one of New York’s largest voting blocs, Hillary’s camp let slip the fact that she had Jewish relatives. Dorothy Rodham’s mother, Della, had divorced her husband in 1927 and married Max Rosenberg six years later. Together, they had a daughter—Hillary’s aunt Adeline.
The Forward,
a weekly Jewish newspaper, described Hillary’s grandmother Della Rosenberg as “the feisty wife of a Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrant,” and suggested that it would enhance her standing with Jewish voters.

Not everyone was convinced, especially since Hillary had never mentioned her Jewish stepgrandfather until this propitious moment. “
OY VEY
!” proclaimed the
New York Post
on its front page.
HILLARY
’
S
ALMOST
JEWISH
. Former New York Mayor Ed Koch, one of Hillary’s biggest boosters, said, “I’m a proud member of the
Jewish faith, and it would be wonderful if Hillary were Jewish. But she’s not.”

The freed FALN terrorists and her newfound Jewish relatives aside, Hillary also had to attend to some rather mundane matters. For purposes of establishing residency in the state, she soon found herself house-hunting. In late August, she and Bill settled on a $1.7 million, 110-year-old, three-story Dutch colonial at 15 Old House Lane in the Westchester County town of Chappaqua, about fifty minutes north of New York City. The five-thousand-square-foot white clapboard house, which boasted a swimming pool and an octagonal screened porch, was situated on a cul-de-sac. While huge Victorian, Federal, pseudo-Tudor, neo-Gothic, and Norman-style mansions loomed on the hill directly behind them, the half-dozen homes on Old House Lane were far from grand. Just a few houses down from the Clintons’, there was a bus stop at the intersection of Old House Lane and busy Route 117. Beyond that was Horace Greeley High School, the global headquarters of
Reader’s Digest,
and, not far up the road, Mount Kisco Country Club.

After spending eighteen years in government housing—the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock and the White House—Hillary was not quite prepared for the Clintons to take the real estate plunge entirely on their own. They turned to Terry McAuliffe, who was rewarded for his fund-raising wizardry by being named Democratic National Committee chairman, to guarantee their $1.35 million mortgage. McAuliffe could well afford it; he had just reaped an $18 million windfall from a $100,000 investment in the fiber-optics network Global Crossing. After this cozy real estate deal was widely condemned in the press as well as by the Office of Government Ethics, the Clintons got another mortgage—this time sans sugar daddy McAuliffe—with the PNC Bank Corporation.

Her listening tour and the Chappaqua house notwithstanding, many New Yorkers still viewed the First Lady’s motives with suspicion.
It didn’t help matters when well-known Chicago Cubs fan Hillary Clinton posed wearing a Yankees cap right after the team’s 1999 World Series victory. “When I saw that,” said L. D. Brown, “I was totally disgusted. Hillary was totally, completely devoted to Chicago—the Cubs and the White Sox. She never once mentioned New York fondly at all during the years I knew her in Arkansas, but Hillary
always
talked about how much she loved Chicago, how she wanted to live there someday, the whole bit.”

Around the time she proclaimed herself a Yankees fan, Hillary made what could have been the biggest gaff of her campaign during an official visit to the Middle East as First Lady. At one point, she nodded in approval as Suha Arafat, wife of PLO leader Yasser Arafat, accused Israel of, among other things, using poison gas on Palestinians. Then Hillary marched to the podium, embraced Mrs. Arafat warmly—and kissed her.

Hillary would later try to explain that she had not actually understood the translation of Mrs. Arafat’s poison-gas remarks, but backpedaled when the translation was released. Clear and precise, it left no room for doubt as to what Mrs. Arafat was saying. Hillary, suggested an Israeli official who was present, “looked as if she was caught up in the moment. It was definitely a very warm exchange between Hillary and Suha Arafat. A lot of us were shocked.”

It should have come as a shock to no one, given Hillary’s long-standing support of the Palestinian cause in general and the PLO in particular. During the Senate campaign, pains would be taken to downplay the fact that Yasser Arafat had been invited to the White House more times than any other world leader. Hillary also prayed that no one would notice that Arafat was so pleased with the treatment he had received from the Clintons that he had given them $12,000 worth of gold and diamond jewelry—rings, bracelets, and necklaces that Hillary quietly consigned to the National Archives with other offerings from world leaders.

Hillary’s overt display of affection toward Arafat’s wife was only one of several incidents that aroused suspicion in New York’s Jewish community. Later in the campaign Paul Fray, who had managed Bill’s first, unsuccessful bid for Congress back in 1974, would confirm stories that Hillary once called him a “fucking Jew bastard.” State Trooper Larry Patterson would add that this was nothing new: he often heard Hillary and Bill call each other “Jew bastard” and “Jew motherfucker.” In Hillary’s case, Patterson said he had heard her make anti-Semitic slurs “at least twenty times” in the heat of anger.

“It did not happen,” Hillary responded to Paul Fray’s allegation. “I have never said anything like that. Ever. Ever.”

In fact, Paul Fray conceded that Hillary’s alleged remark “had a lot less to do with religion and a lot more to do with how much Hillary hated me.” Five years later, however, Hillary’s capacity for making ethnically insensitive remarks surfaced again—at yet another fund-raiser, this time in St. Louis. Managing to both insult one of history’s towering figures and reinforce a painful stereotype for many Indian immigrants, Hillary cracked, “You know Mahatma Gandhi. He ran a gas station down in St. Louis.” Following the inevitable uproar over the comment, Hillary apologized for what she called a “lame attempt at humor.” For those who actually heard her deliver the line, however, it was not just the comment itself. “It was the
way
she said it,” commented an audience member. “It was nasty, mean-spirited. And it was done quite naturally, as if she didn’t have a clue why anybody would take offense. I was shocked.”